Arena of Antares [Dray Prescot #7]

by Alan Burt Akers

  “There is no other way—you cannot pull me—push!"

  A woman screamed shrilly and most distressingly from somewhere in the greater darkness at his back. He did not hesitate more. “May Opaz the Mighty and All-Beneficent have you in his keeping, and may the Invisible Twins smile upon you—” And he put his booted foot against my back and thrust.

  At the same time I summoned up every last shred of willpower I possessed and forced my body to obey. I got my hands free and moved my feet and then Mahmud nal Yrmcelt's thrust kicked me clear. The slab smashed down with a great and horrible thunking, so that slate chips flew from the bottom edge.

  Hands caught me as I sprawled forward. My body felt as though it had been knotted and starched and then unwound, aching inch by aching inch. I shuddered and drew huge gasping breaths. I tried to twist my arm away. Slick with sweat as it was it should have sprung away easily. But the locked grip of the Rhaclaw held fast. My limbs trembled. I felt a trilling vibration all through my poor abused old body and I knew I wasn't going to clamber to my feet and bash a few skulls for some time yet.

  Mind you, I promised myself as I was swiftly carried out into the sunshine, some skull-bashing seemed an inevitable prospect.

  Once more my duty—imposed and arbitrary—to the Star Lords had flung me headlong into danger and perils of a kind I could not then conceive, but which were to become hatefully familiar in the succeeding days.

  Assuming two things—one: that my transit here from the battlefield of the Valley of the Crimson Missals had followed immediately in time, and I was not caught in another of those weird and damnable time loops of the Star Lords (and, as you will hear, that was a mistaken assumption); and, two: the weather had not changed drastically—I fancied I was not very many dwaburs nearer the equator. The suns gave me that impression. Of course, as Kregen swings about the Suns of Scorpio they will appear to change in size, and their size changes are visibly greater than that of old Sol from Earth. The air had a warmer feel, and there were unfamiliar scents from the trees and flowering bushes surrounding the entrance to the cavern.

  Twin shadows fell from my horizontal body as I was hauled out.

  I was dumped into the back of a quoffa cart. Above me reared a craggy cliff face, its fissures dappled with the glowing colors of rock plants and the green of shrubs. A fringe of thorn-ivy grew in a level line I did not think natural about a hundred feet up that cliff. I had the hope that the terrified people would escape from secret exits tunneled into the rock.

  The quoffa were whipped into action. I frowned. Of all the animals of Kregen the quoffa least need chastisement. With their huge, patient old faces and their perambulating hearth-rug bodies, they are docile and obedient and completely lovable and dependable. The carts creaked and moved forward. There were seven carts and each was stuffed with half-naked men and women and halflings, all bound with thongs, and most groaning and crying and sobbing and lamenting.

  No need to inquire what was going on, or who we were.

  I was partially wrong in that instinctive assessment, as you shall hear. But the difference was, if Zair will forgive me, a difference I was to welcome.

  The fact that I was also bound made little impression, for my muscles seemed still locked in the stasis caused by holding up that damned great weight. The thongs were of a kind and thickness—they were not lesten-hide—I would have snapped by a single muscular surge.

  We bumped along and I took in the new sights and impressions around me as a matter of course. That length of scarlet cloth I had picked up in the cavern worried me. It hung around my hips now, and I was as respectably dressed as many of the slaves. Always—so far—the Star Lords and the Savanti had brought me to Kregen stark naked. The Star Lords dumped me down into diabolical situations naked and unarmed and with only my wits and strength and cunning to get me through. I had understood that I would think less of them as they of me had they provided me clothes and weapons, a helmet, and a spear, say, a sword and shield. But this time a damned scorpion had chittered words at me, and called me by my name, and in this new emergency I had found a length of scarlet humespack. Was that coincidence? Or had the Star Lords decided to give me a little more assistance than they had ever done before?

  We bumped along between the trees and so came out onto a reasonably good road, dusty but firm. On either hand stretched vast fields ablaze with flowers. Soon this purely decorative agriculture gave way to crops thriving under the suns. I saw marspear and sweet corn—which I detest—and crop plants of kinds unfamiliar to me then. Because I could see out only backward, like the man who always sits with his back to the engine, I had no idea of where we were being carried. The fields opened and I saw good quality fat cattle grazing, with men riding zorcas among them. We passed occasional hamlets with small cottages made from honest brick with thatched roofs, and a village well. The procession wound on and I felt hungry and thirsty; but we stopped only once to be given sips of water from huge orange gourds, and a mouthful of palines each. The palines were thrust into our open mouths by skinny, gaunt lackadaisical girls with stringy hair, who ministered to the Rhaclaws. Then we creaked and groaned on our way.

  This was a rich land. That was very clear.

  We passed a gang of slaves digging ditches, and I marked the Fristles who stood guard, as well as Ochs who wielded the whips.

  Suddenly there came a bustling commotion and the old quoffas were lashed to the side of the road, the wheels of the carts slipping into the drainage ditch. I heard the crash and stamp of metal-studded sandals.

  A column of infantry passed. I thought, at first, they were Canops. But no pagan silver image of Lem, the leaping leem, crowned their standards. These soldiers with their tall helmets, tufted with feathers from the whistling faerling, with their scaled and plated armor, greaves, shields, stuxes, thraxters, and crossbows, marched following a golden image of a zhantil.

  If I thought of Pando, boy Kov of Bormark, then, who can blame me?

  Of almost all the wonderful wild animals of Kregen, I might have chosen a zhantil for my standard.

  We were hauled out of the ditch and went on, and a bur or so later, again were driven off the road by the passage of a brilliant body of zorcamen. They were resplendent in armor and gems, silks and embroideries, their lances all slanting at the same angle, their helmets ashine under the suns. They trotted past most gallantly. I wouldn't have minded ripping each one from his ornate saddle and breaking his back across my knees. But I, Dray Prescot, still felt the effects of that damned great slate slab. By the time we passed under an archway and I heard the muted roar of a great city all about me, the stiffness was wearing off. The suns hung low to the sky and the horizon sheeted in emerald and crimson, opaz colors filled with a dying radiance. Then towers and ramparts and roofs jagged against that sky glory and the shadows dropped down.

  The carts pulled into a flagged courtyard and the Rhaclaws yelled commands. Torches flared. Stone walls, frowning and somber, rose about us. We were hauled out and pushed and prodded into line. Although the stiffness had quite worn off now, and I had bulged my muscles and found to my satisfaction that my battered old body responded once more to my will, I fell down and lay on the stone flags. I was kicked. I continued to lie there. I was looking for the man in command.

  Then I saw him. A Jiktar, he strutted out, rather paunchy as to waist and puffy as to feature, but a fighting-man for all that. His armor glinted redly in the torchlight.

  “Won't get up, Notor,” reported the Deldar in command of the slave detail.

  “If he's damaged goods he is of no use to us.” The Jiktar's words carried a nasal whine. He glared down on me.

  This, I felt, must be the time. I had suffered a very great deal. I had been kicked and prodded and mauled, and I was bound with thongs and I was destined for slavery. Well, someone would be sorry for all that before I was finished.

  I broke the bonds with a single convulsive jerk.

  I stood up.

  The Rhaclaws began to ye
ll at once.

  The Jiktar took a step back, and then I took his pudgy throat between my fists. I did not kill him. I threw him at the nearest bunch of Rhaclaws. They are a stocky lot, the Rhaclaws, with two arms and two legs, and heads that are so large and dome shaped that, lacking a neck, their chops seem to rest on their shoulders and, as Zair is my witness, are almost as wide as those shoulders. I say they do not have necks; this is not perfectly true. They do have a small disclike neck that enables their massive domed heads to swivel. Now their two legs apiece did not stop them from toppling over in a muddle as the Jiktar struck them. “Seize him!” someone was yelling, as there is always someone willing to shout those easy words rather than to dive in.

  I picked up a Rhaclaw who was driving in with his stux low at me, and whirled him about my head. I yelled, then, like a fool: “Hai, Hikai!"

  The huge domed head of the Rhaclaw cut a swath through his fellows. I forged on. Things were becoming interesting. One or two of the slaves were beginning to jump up and down, and at least three of them had freed themselves from their bonds. We might make a tasty little party of this yet.

  The gate lay open. No one had thought to close it on a rabble of cowed slaves. The Rhaclaw-club in my fists cleared a path. I aimed for the gate. Torchlight spattered the scene with drops of ruby radiance. Shadows writhed at the gate and I saw a Hikdar—he was apim—hurling his stux.

  A quick roll of the wrists interposed my human club and the Rhaclaw made no sound, for he was already unconscious, as the stux penetrated his chest.

  I bashed my way on, and dodged two more flung stuxes, and then a Rhaclaw came at me with a thraxter. He was smashed to the side. His great domed head struck the gate, burst, and blood and brains splashed out, vivid in the torch glare.

  I felt sorry for him. But then, he should never have hired out as a mercenary had he not envisaged some such bloody ending.

  “Run with me, comrades!” I roared at the slaves. Some responded. I saw a burly fellow with a shock of villainous black hair slashing about him with a thraxter. He handled the weapon as he would handle a cutting knife in the cane fields. Others ran to follow me.

  Swinging back to the gate I started through, and this time I draped the senseless Rhaclaw over my back and so heard the individual sick chunk of three stuxes as they smashed into him, poor chap, instead of my naked back.

  I was through the gateway.

  The torchlight dimmed, but the Maiden with the Many Smiles floated serenely above, a little cloud drifting across her smiling pink face.

  Fresh torches blazed before my face. A group of men. riding half-voves halted and the glitter from their accouterments near blinded me. I shook my hair back and glared up at them.

  Their leader stared down, remote, in complete command, with a haughtiness I recognized and loathed.

  “Hai, Jikai!” I roared, and swung the dead Rhaclaw and let fly at this supercilious rast astride his half-vove. He ducked. The Rhaclaw flew past.

  The half-vove rider spoke in an icy tone of voice.

  'Take him alive!"

  The half-voves closed in.

  Well, they were tougher opponents, but I could handle them.

  From nowhere a net descended about me, enveloping me. I had no knife, no sword. I fought the strands, the smothering folds tangling and obstructing. Men dropped from the high saddles of the half-voves and closed in. Their thraxters gleamed most wickedly in the confused lights of the torches and of the Maiden with the Many Smiles.

  I took two strands of the net into my fists and wrenched, and wrenched two more, and so tore a hole in the net.

  I thrust up through the net, kicking it from me.

  The first man was upon me.

  I slid his sword, chopped him across the neck, took his sword away, and parried the immediately following onslaught from three of his fellows.

  They sought to strike me with the flat and so knock me senseless.

  I used the edge, for I cared nothing of them.

  They wore armor and billowing cloaks, very romantic in the streaming moonlight. I was near naked, clad only in an old scarlet breechclout I had had no time to fasten properly.

  That I, Dray Prescot, Krozair of Zy, Lord of Strombor—and much else besides—should be laid low by a breechclout!

  And—my own old scarlet breechclout, at that.

  I sprang and leaped and fought and beat them back and so took stock of a fine half-vove and readied myself to leap upon his broad back and so urge him away with those special clansmen's words that only we and the voves may understand.

  I leaped all right—but I was heading downward instead of upward.

  The scarlet breechclout had finally untwisted and fallen about my legs. Tripped, I pitched headlong.

  In the next moment something extraordinarily hard and heavy sledged alongside my head and there was no time for a single chime from the bells of Beng-Kishi.

  * * *

  Chapter Eight

  In the Jikhorkdun

  Nath the Arm glowered on the recruits as we stood on silver sand in the wooden-walled ring, blinking in the suns-light, shuffling our feet. We were coys, for anything that is young and green and untested on Kregen is often dubbed a coy, with a sly laugh, and we screwed up our eyes and stared up at Nath the Arm as he looked down on us from his pedestal.

  “Unequal combat is the secret,” he roared at us. “That is what pulls the crowds. You'll be unequal, and if you live, maybe you'll be unequal the other way.” Nath the Arm chortled, his massive black beard oiled and threaded with gold, his wide-winged ruby-colored jerkin of supple voskskin brilliant with gems, his kilt a splash of vivid saffron. He wore silver greaves. His black hair, graying at the temples, was savagely cut back around his ears.

  The villainous fellow with the black hair who had thrashed about with the sword, back where I had chastised the Rhaclaws, swallowed and grimaced at me. “Unequal?"

  “Silence, rasts!” Nath the Arm thumped a meaty fist onto the wooden rail before him. His face, leathery, whiskered, and lined, crisscrossed with old scars, loomed above us, the huge blue-black beard glittering with gold. “You talk when I tell you. You do anything when I tell you."

  As though we had been faced with a victorious render crew we had been given the alternatives. We could become slaves and work on the farms or in industry or the mines. We might become fodder for the Jikhorkdun. We might, if we thought ourselves apt enough with a weapon, become kaidurs, beginning, of course, as coys. Or, we could be slaughtered, there and then, out of hand.

  Some, who with a shake of the head said they knew of these things, had chosen to go as slaves.

  Those of us here, in the small sanded practice ring hot and sticky beneath the Suns of Scorpio, had chosen to become coys and so perhaps, one day, if we lived, to become kaidurs.

  Escape, we had been told, was impossible, and then, with many a sly wink and nod, Nath the Arm pointed out to us the wonderful advantages enjoyed by a great kaidur: the gold he received as purses, the girls who sighed and lusted for him, the wine he might quaff, the soft living between bouts in the Jikhorkdun where the maddened crowd showered him with plaudits.

  The arena, Nath the Arm told us, was the life for a man.

  Well, I had heard a little of the arenas of Hamal and of Hyrklana, and we were in the capital city of Hyrklana, Huringa, just as the scorpion had promised me.

  Listening as Nath the Arm threatened and promised I had already agreed with myself that at the first opportunity I would test if escape was impossible or not. I needed to get back to Migla and discover what was going on there, after the great Battle of the Crimson Missals, and assure myself that Delia was safe. I shuddered more than a little, as you may well judge, at the thought that any of my comrades might discover how I had tripped over my own scarlet breechclout. How Seg and Inch would roar! How Hap Loder and Prince Varden would chuckle! How Turko would lift a quizzical eyebrow! How, in short, all my good comrades would think it a great jest that I, Dray Prescot, had been b
rought low by a breechclout.

  Questions as to dates produced the same bewildering and conflicting replies as one would find over all of Kregen. Men called their days by names they fancied themselves, and sennights likewise. With seven moons floating in the sky the month—surprisingly moon-cycle mensuration was known and practiced—hardly counted. As for seasons, men dated the beginning of a seasonal cycle from many and various occurrences. Usually it would be from the founding of a city, as in the case of Rome on Earth, or a great game cycle, as of the Greeks and their Olympiads, or the birth of a great philosopher, or the travel of a seer from the place of his birth to the place of his ministry, very familiar to us on Earth. Hyrklana dated her seasons from the foundation of the Lily City Klana—the old capital away down in the south of the island, long since tumbled into ruin. By that reckoning this was the year 2076. A relatively new nation, on Kregen, then, the people of Hyrklana.

  I wondered if I would meet Princess Lilah. That, I owned as I sweated through the drills prescribed by Nath the Arm, would be pleasurable. I was human enough to admit that a great deal of the pleasure would come from what I hoped would be her immediate adoption of me as friend and her instant removal of my ugly old carcass from the arena. But I knew, too, that the deeper part of that pleasure would be in the knowledge she had escaped successfully astride that fluttrell from the Manhounds of Faol.

  We were afforded an early opportunity to see what occurred in the Jikhorkdun of this city of Huringa.

  The suns shot their brilliant rays across the raked silver sand. Blood spots were covered with fresh sprinkled sand, raked and leveled. Deeply into the ground, in a great natural hollow, had been set the arena. Around it and sloping up the sides of the honeycombed hill rose tier after tier of seats and private boxes. Above these towered the walls, lofting high, carrying the terraced seating away up to dizzying heights. I have mentioned that the telescope is known on Kregen, and a spectator up there would have need of one when the combats were staged down in the arena. When the peculiar Kregan form of vol-combat was produced, then everyone had his or her own chance to see everything that might occur.